The History of History - By Ida Hattemer-Higgins Page 0,135

deadly.

Margaret covered her face.

She heard a low moan. It may have been her own.

Regina’s usual delicate body—all at once it reappeared. Her face was gentle and serene, her presence next to Margaret’s image in the mirror was warm and grave, a Solomon, a bearded patriarch.

“Don’t cry,” Regina said.

Margaret looked up at her.

“It was only a test.”

But if it was only a test—Margaret blinked. And then she thought: No. It did not matter what Regina said, the wise and gentle woman was gone, and the bear had come to stay. The bear was truer. The bear, if it were ever encapsulated, would not be the sugar pill.

Margaret looked in the mirror and saw a bear on all fours on the floor of the foyer, beginning to rise up again, opening its darling and terrible mouth—an ursine clown—hungry, on top of its hoisting thighs, for Margaret’s life.

THIRTY-ONE • The Isolation of the Fanatic

Of course, it was only a dream.

But some dreams will not easily die. In the weeks afterward, a leftover chirring, a fly in the room, an intermittent itch on Margaret’s cheek—it remained. The fly’s legs chafed her consciousness like the wires of a bugging device that can be discovered but not removed.

Margaret had to find her way back to the old Regina.

A long, long time, she had occupied herself with pageants—she saw that now. Her alliances and identifications were the pseudo-involvement of the sleeping dog that moves its paws as it lies, dreaming of the hunt.

But she had to take sides now. And not take sides quixotically, but by loving the right Regina actively, committing herself through some irrevocable sign. And like so many people whose rage has too long been impotent, Margaret Taub was vulnerable to fantasies of vengeance.

One of the unstillable horrors of the Holocaust is that there is no vengeance to be had. Millions killed by millions more—there is no justice there. There will be no restitution. The victims are too many; the perpetrators are legion. The perpetrators are in every yard, in every government that provided police support, in every town that cast Jews out of knitting circles and marching bands, out of guilds and pensions, that starved neighbors out to the cattle cars all across Europe. Before and after it was a political policy, the Holocaust was a social movement. Not civilian cooperation but civilian enthusiasm was the sine qua non of the Shoah. A wave of genocidal anti-Semitism washed the Western world during the first twitches of modernity, and the Nazis rode the crest of it as it crashed; gave it forever a German face. But the dagger of revenge lies unused in the drawer. There is no body into which to plunge it. Margaret had been flailing against the stone-cold wall of vengeancelessness—she had been flailing against that nonsense-truth for a long time.

The dream of the bear. To herself, Margaret said it had “broken her heart.” But in the days afterward, she thought she had dreamed the dream for this reason: she wished for such a Regina. She wished for a Regina who fought and killed. Not because she loved heroes, not because it would mean justice, but because she did not know how to live in a world where there was no second fight. In such a universe, she did not even know how to think.

Now—mark what happened next. In the following weeks, the dice were loaded. Margaret was stuffed to the bursting point with a heavy desire for vengeance. And if it could not be on a grand scale, then it should be on a small one. And so there came a blind spin of fortune’s wheel, and when it came to a stop, the arrow rested on the only person it could have rested on. The only man who was still alive. Hitler’s bodyguard, the old man in his potpourri house, Arthur Prell.

Are you surprised? But it could have rested on no other!

This is how it went. The first days after Margaret’s dream, they passed slowly, tediously. It was as though, in her fascination with vengeance, Margaret was waiting for the arrival of hordes, an army gathering in the east, and she could not fight her ferocious fight until they arrived. She bided her time.

And then, slowly, she began to think of him. She remembered how, when she had seen him near the bunker talking to skateboarding kids, she had remained still, even when she had wanted to flee or destroy him. And she remembered how, behind the veil of